Hökaland

Politics, swords and blood

Masterwork

The masterwork rules are added primarily to compensate that it’s so hard to get magical weapons, but also because there really are very large differences in worksmanship quality with weapons. I’d assume that the average weapon in DnD world is pretty good, and MW is as good as it gets. In Hokaland, a regular weapon is decent/low quality and there are levels of improvements to be made.

Prices are cumulative with original weapon/armor cost.

A masterwork weapon can be improved (this is more for game mechanics than realism) by paying 100gp plus the cost difference. The idea is that it’s already a very good weapon so changing the weight balance slightly or adding one or two layers of folded metal on top of the existing metalwork will improve effectiveness without re-forging the whole weapon.

Note that while a +1 or +2 bonus here is slightly more expensive than a magic version of +2 (that you have to pay to stack with magic), it adds +2 total attack outside of the exponentially increasing cost of magical items.